The Tip: When looking at long sentence first identify whether it’s a -AはBだ or -AはBをする(suru is placeholder for any verb) type of sentence Identify A,B, (and if needed) the verb and that is your core sentence. Then the rest of the words just add details to the core
I started this video thinking "this is clickbait, I've seen thousands of those videos, he will say something like "Remember all 2000 kanjis!"", but no. Man, this is incredible advice, and I will definitely implement that starting today. It's a really good timing because I just recently got into reading books in Japanese, so I guess I'll do it right from the "almost" beginning. Thank you!
7:41 this is paramount to learning the differences in how Japanese is communicated and has always been a huge challenge for me. It comes back to that common feeling of "I know these words, I can read the kanji, I hear the pronunciation, why can't I understand this?!" Thank you for this video.
The Believer’s Great Hope So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever. -2 Corinthians 4:18 Deep inside us, there is a sense that there’s something more in life. No matter what experiences we’ve had, no matter how wonderful they were, they were only a glimpse of what is still ahead. We are homesick for a place we’ve never been to, and that place is Heaven. The Bible says that we were wired this way, that God “has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) This simply means we have a sense there is more to life, and that keeps us moving forward. It’s like the homing instinct we see in the animal kingdom. Our homing instinct, however, is for a place we haven’t yet seen. If you are a Christian, then you are going to Heaven. Jesus said, “There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am” (John 14:2-3) Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t tell us that much about Heaven. There are some passages about it, but not a lot. For example, the apostle Paul had the unique experience of dying, going to Heaven, and having to come back to earth. Paul didn’t go into great detail about what he saw on the other side. But he said this much: “I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell” (2 Corinthians 12:4) For us to try to understand something as glorious as Heaven would be like a six-month-old baby trying to understand an explanation about the beauty of Hawaii. It’s very hard for us to wrap our minds around. No matter what happens to us on this earth, it pales in comparison to this great hope. Writing to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul said, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So, we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18) This is the hope of the Christian. There’s a better world ahead. Until that day, there is nothing that will completely satisfy our lives. There’s something greater than what we are experiencing now. Yet, not everyone has this hope. If you don’t have this hope in Christ, then you ought to be afraid right now. You ought to be afraid if you don’t know whether you will go to Heaven. The believer has great hope beyond all of this. We have the great hope that a place called Heaven is waiting for us on the other side.
I procrastinate a lot when it comes to reading japanese because my brain tells me it's gonna be sooo hard. This video has given me motivation to try again, thank you!
It's easy to do with with lots of things. Exercise. Working on a side project. Just have to hop in and tell yourself you'll do it for 10 minutes. After that you can take a break if you're really struggling or it might not be that bad and you can keep going!
Thank you. As someone who has been struggling with Japanese for ten years and wrestling with novels for most of that time, this was a great opportunity to take a step back and reflect on the “big picture” and look at the forest rather than the trees. I’ve been following your sub stack and you tube videos for several years, and really appreciate your advice for learners. It’s great to see that even someone who has achieved a high level in Japanese struggled with many of the same issues in the learning process!
Thank you for the kind words!! And yes, struggle I did! But can also say it's been 100% worth the long journey, so don't give up! Happy to help where I can :))
The Believer’s Great Hope So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever. -2 Corinthians 4:18 Deep inside us, there is a sense that there’s something more in life. No matter what experiences we’ve had, no matter how wonderful they were, they were only a glimpse of what is still ahead. We are homesick for a place we’ve never been to, and that place is Heaven. The Bible says that we were wired this way, that God “has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) This simply means we have a sense there is more to life, and that keeps us moving forward. It’s like the homing instinct we see in the animal kingdom. Our homing instinct, however, is for a place we haven’t yet seen. If you are a Christian, then you are going to Heaven. Jesus said, “There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am” (John 14:2-3) Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t tell us that much about Heaven. There are some passages about it, but not a lot. For example, the apostle Paul had the unique experience of dying, going to Heaven, and having to come back to earth. Paul didn’t go into great detail about what he saw on the other side. But he said this much: “I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell” (2 Corinthians 12:4) For us to try to understand something as glorious as Heaven would be like a six-month-old baby trying to understand an explanation about the beauty of Hawaii. It’s very hard for us to wrap our minds around. No matter what happens to us on this earth, it pales in comparison to this great hope. Writing to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul said, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So, we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18) This is the hope of the Christian. There’s a better world ahead. Until that day, there is nothing that will completely satisfy our lives. There’s something greater than what we are experiencing now. Yet, not everyone has this hope. If you don’t have this hope in Christ, then you ought to be afraid right now. You ought to be afraid if you don’t know whether you will go to Heaven. The believer has great hope beyond all of this. We have the great hope that a place called Heaven is waiting for us on the other side.
I'm really interested to know after 10 years of reading novels how you feel about your level and things you think might have been missing from your strategy if it doesn't feel satisfactory. I've sort of been going forward with reading lots of short stories the past year with a kind of assumption my level will gradually rise as I get used to things. Do you think I'm likely to be disappointed? Everybody applies this strategy in a bit of a different way, so I'm curious if it may be an indefinite struggle for me and my way.
What are your struggles you’ve had over your ten year journey? I just started 2 weeks ago and I have a good plan but I def need as much advice as possible to achieve decent fluency in 2 years instead of 10 😅
@@CaptainWumbo I’ve passed JLPT N2, but not quite N1 yet. This is just a hobby, I have a full time job and kids, so I study a few hours a week. All the time I steadily feel like I understand a little more than before. I started with graded readers and then moved on to novels from accessible authors like 西村京太郎 or 東野圭吾。I don’t have any great advice other than try and dive into native Japanese materials that you would enjoy even if it was in your own language whether it’s manga or anime or detective novels or serious literature or whatever. Good luck!
When I read in Japanese I don't really translate into English. As when I read my mind turns words into movie like images and sounds. Also when I have any areas that I don't understand I find that if I keep going I tend to understand it later subconsciously. Though it is only my 2nd year of reading and I am already seeing vast amounts of improvements. I am excited for what my 3rd and 4th years reading can do for my Japanese skills.
Very helpful tips, advice on reading Japanese is somewhat rare to find, especially on TH-cam. Initially, I used to stumble a lot when encountering long sentences, but after reading extensively, I gradually got used to the flow of Japanese writing "for the most part." One tip I learned from Luke Ranieri is to read while listening to audio books. They have noticeably helped me increase my reading speed because the narrator adds emotion to the sentences, making them easier to understand and parse.
I've been learning japanese for 3 years and I still struggle with long sentences.Thank you so much! This gives me a totallly new perspective about japanese grammar.
A highly important thing to be doing is reading native narrative sentences rather than just reading people talking to each other. A month or two of reading a LOT of narrative work enhanced my japanese more than anything else ever did. It is incredibly easy to "get lost" in narratives because everything is so based on context. Reading slower also makes it harder to keep track of the narrative. What's the solution? Just read more and more narratives. It's really the only way to do it (and studying grammar points as they pop up). Just use a pop-up dictionary like Yomitan and your own brain to find grammatical structures that look unfamiliar.
I have been reading a lot of Visual Novels in Japanese recently and this really helped me a lot. Literally gave me a eureka moment. Thank you Bunsuke-sensei.
The Believer’s Great Hope So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever. -2 Corinthians 4:18 Deep inside us, there is a sense that there’s something more in life. No matter what experiences we’ve had, no matter how wonderful they were, they were only a glimpse of what is still ahead. We are homesick for a place we’ve never been to, and that place is Heaven. The Bible says that we were wired this way, that God “has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) This simply means we have a sense there is more to life, and that keeps us moving forward. It’s like the homing instinct we see in the animal kingdom. Our homing instinct, however, is for a place we haven’t yet seen. If you are a Christian, then you are going to Heaven. Jesus said, “There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am” (John 14:2-3) Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t tell us that much about Heaven. There are some passages about it, but not a lot. For example, the apostle Paul had the unique experience of dying, going to Heaven, and having to come back to earth. Paul didn’t go into great detail about what he saw on the other side. But he said this much: “I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell” (2 Corinthians 12:4) For us to try to understand something as glorious as Heaven would be like a six-month-old baby trying to understand an explanation about the beauty of Hawaii. It’s very hard for us to wrap our minds around. No matter what happens to us on this earth, it pales in comparison to this great hope. Writing to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul said, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So, we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18) This is the hope of the Christian. There’s a better world ahead. Until that day, there is nothing that will completely satisfy our lives. There’s something greater than what we are experiencing now. Yet, not everyone has this hope. If you don’t have this hope in Christ, then you ought to be afraid right now. You ought to be afraid if you don’t know whether you will go to Heaven. The believer has great hope beyond all of this. We have the great hope that a place called Heaven is waiting for us on the other side.
This is so funny because I've been discouraged from reading recently, struggling on a very long sentence that was breaking my ability to parse any meaning, and it's LITERALLY THE SENTENCE YOU CHOSE from konbini ningen. Thank you for the tips, you've helped me push through that discomfort.
@@bunsuke.nihongo recently passed n5 exam and currently studying in n4 classes. But more of my learning comes from watching a ton of youtube videos such as podcasts and other immersion videos as well as a ton of anime without subtitles. Listening comprehension has become a strong skill of mine but I struggle with reading since I don't read nearly as much other than textbooks
Great video - For me, as someone who is starting to get into much longer Japanese reading, some tips - 1) Contrary to what I've been told in the past, I think studying Japanese names and their readings is really important for fast reading - not really to know the true reading, but because many of the readings to the untrained reader appear like ordinary words, and it helps to know what is not a word - this reduces the amount of context to interpret in the sentence, and you can replace that part of the sentence with a black box. It also helps you identify place names, people, cities, and locations, which is not necessarily important for the meaning of the sentence. I use Japanese name anki decks for this. 2) If you don't understand at least 70% of the words you're reading (7 out of 10 words), the work may be too difficult and you should probably stop to learn the vocabulary first -
This is very helpful! Actually, this is also how I practiced my English reading skills. But what I often struggle with is that Japanese sentences don't usually have a clear subject, which really gives me a hard time trying to identify who does the action. Also, the most confusing pair of particles of は and が makes it even harder for me to read Japanese
Because in a way Japanese sentences do not have subject, only doer of the action. The so-called subject in Japanese is not that important, and it can be omitted. は just like も do not indicate the subject. Only "が" does. For details read my long comment I posted ten minutes ago.
The Believer’s Great Hope So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever. -2 Corinthians 4:18 Deep inside us, there is a sense that there’s something more in life. No matter what experiences we’ve had, no matter how wonderful they were, they were only a glimpse of what is still ahead. We are homesick for a place we’ve never been to, and that place is Heaven. The Bible says that we were wired this way, that God “has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) This simply means we have a sense there is more to life, and that keeps us moving forward. It’s like the homing instinct we see in the animal kingdom. Our homing instinct, however, is for a place we haven’t yet seen. If you are a Christian, then you are going to Heaven. Jesus said, “There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am” (John 14:2-3) Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t tell us that much about Heaven. There are some passages about it, but not a lot. For example, the apostle Paul had the unique experience of dying, going to Heaven, and having to come back to earth. Paul didn’t go into great detail about what he saw on the other side. But he said this much: “I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell” (2 Corinthians 12:4) For us to try to understand something as glorious as Heaven would be like a six-month-old baby trying to understand an explanation about the beauty of Hawaii. It’s very hard for us to wrap our minds around. No matter what happens to us on this earth, it pales in comparison to this great hope. Writing to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul said, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So, we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18) This is the hope of the Christian. There’s a better world ahead. Until that day, there is nothing that will completely satisfy our lives. There’s something greater than what we are experiencing now. Yet, not everyone has this hope. If you don’t have this hope in Christ, then you ought to be afraid right now. You ought to be afraid if you don’t know whether you will go to Heaven. The believer has great hope beyond all of this. We have the great hope that a place called Heaven is waiting for us on the other side.
Hello Bunsuke-sensei, I'm one of your YT and Instagram followers, from Italy. I rarely comment on TH-cam but I wanted to make an exception today because I would like to thank you for this video: it's filled to the brim with very valuable advice. I've been studying Japanese for a long time. I spent a few years in Japan, studied Japanese at university, completed a degree in Japanese literature (my dissertation was on Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's 陰影礼賛) and then continued my learning journey pretty much solo because I still have a long, long way to go. As if I've barely scratched the surface. It's been a rough and lonely journey. Lots of struggling, tears and discouragement. However, there's an underpinning drive to conquer this mountain and this is why, somehow, I can't give up. The sense of wonder and enrichment I get along the way is something that never ceases to amaze me. One thing that has always been a part of my studies are books and the incessant love for reading (and writing!). So, despite what many may say or recommend, I find that reading a lot is most beneficial (paper books). I tackle books without fear, no matter how difficult they may appear to be (and often are). I've tried the Anki route but there's just something about absorbing vocabulary or kanji disconnected from their contexts that makes learning impersonal and, in the end, fruitless. And not learning from real paper books is another obstacle for me. So why am I writing all of this? Because I truly appreciated the tips and tricks you've shared in this video: they're smart hacks that can make my journey a bit easier. I read all kinds of things, from food essays to contemporary literature (I really enjoy Hiromi Kawakami's stories) but still I keep hitting walls with convoluted sentences that sometimes just make me question why I am even bothering with all of this. I guess I'm really in need of some encouragement to keep going. Sometimes the reading is a smooth sail while others it's like hiking in nettle-infested woods. It sometimes feels like I'll never ever make it. Oh and by the way, I am also one of your subscribers to your excellent newsletter which I learn a lot from. Please keep it up and thank you SO much for reading my comment.
Thank you for your thoughtful and kind comment!!! I'm glad this content is helping you out. Language learning always has more downs than ups but the small wins usually make it worth the pain and effort. Btw I have some wonderful people in my group lessons. If you'd like to have a less lonely reading experience perhaps you could consider joining the cohort from the May semester. Just throwing it out there are an option :) good luck, and let me know if there's anything I can do to help!
I believe your channel is the most useful resource for the people who are going from beginner to intermediate Japanese or even advanced Japanese. No other channel really covers so well the topics that you've been talking about. I would highly recommend your channel to all of my friends who are studying Japanese
Thanks so much!! Please do spread the word, i'd love it if my platfprm reached more people in the awkward beginner-to-intermediate and beyond phase of their Japanese language learning journey :))
The Believer’s Great Hope So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever. -2 Corinthians 4:18 Deep inside us, there is a sense that there’s something more in life. No matter what experiences we’ve had, no matter how wonderful they were, they were only a glimpse of what is still ahead. We are homesick for a place we’ve never been to, and that place is Heaven. The Bible says that we were wired this way, that God “has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) This simply means we have a sense there is more to life, and that keeps us moving forward. It’s like the homing instinct we see in the animal kingdom. Our homing instinct, however, is for a place we haven’t yet seen. If you are a Christian, then you are going to Heaven. Jesus said, “There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am” (John 14:2-3) Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t tell us that much about Heaven. There are some passages about it, but not a lot. For example, the apostle Paul had the unique experience of dying, going to Heaven, and having to come back to earth. Paul didn’t go into great detail about what he saw on the other side. But he said this much: “I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell” (2 Corinthians 12:4) For us to try to understand something as glorious as Heaven would be like a six-month-old baby trying to understand an explanation about the beauty of Hawaii. It’s very hard for us to wrap our minds around. No matter what happens to us on this earth, it pales in comparison to this great hope. Writing to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul said, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So, we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18) This is the hope of the Christian. There’s a better world ahead. Until that day, there is nothing that will completely satisfy our lives. There’s something greater than what we are experiencing now. Yet, not everyone has this hope. If you don’t have this hope in Christ, then you ought to be afraid right now. You ought to be afraid if you don’t know whether you will go to Heaven. The believer has great hope beyond all of this. We have the great hope that a place called Heaven is waiting for us on the other side.
this will be a HUGE help for me! i’ve been reading a lot of japanese short stories and reading visual novels and often tend to be lost in the smaller details and i end up getting frustrated when seeing bigger blocks of sentences like you pointed out in the コンビニ人間 segment. this video felt like a lightbulb turning on in my head. much thanks Bunsuke-sensei!!
What a great video. I started learning Japanese by learning the 2100 Kanji first, a ton of vocab, did N5 and N4 grammar and thought I was ready to start reading something more complicated than children books. It was quite demotivating to see that I knew almost all of the Kanji and vocab in a sentence but still struggled to figure out the complete meaning. I think this video opened up my eyes, at least a great motivation to approach it differently than I did.
7:00 I'm so happy I got close to that, I translated it in my head as "Japanese people act with the feelings of others in mind" I guess that entire sentence can just be called 建前、(Tatemae) Which is the 'mindset' of which an overwhelming majority of Japanese people abide by. The meaning as i understand it is as follows. - Don't cause inconvenience to those around you, Don't engage in behaviours that bother those around you or negatively impact society or the image of Japan, or your family. The positive points of this has made Japan a very safe and clean country. While the negative parts further push down the real self more than other societies. Hence the type of social problems that we see in Japan being a lot more frequent in Japan per capita than most other countries. And the culture sometimes seeming very strange, due to gameshows, interview techniques, adds, (Cultured content) I realized I spent too much time on this comment and gave up, it's not great but it's good enough. Thanks.
To me the moment of revelation about て was accepting that it can mean quite different things, in different usages, probably because different 助詞 and 助動詞 eventually merged into the same sound て over hundreds of years (don't quote me on that) The "under the circumstance of" method sounds great! Gotta try it too
The Believer’s Great Hope So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever. -2 Corinthians 4:18 Deep inside us, there is a sense that there’s something more in life. No matter what experiences we’ve had, no matter how wonderful they were, they were only a glimpse of what is still ahead. We are homesick for a place we’ve never been to, and that place is Heaven. The Bible says that we were wired this way, that God “has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) This simply means we have a sense there is more to life, and that keeps us moving forward. It’s like the homing instinct we see in the animal kingdom. Our homing instinct, however, is for a place we haven’t yet seen. If you are a Christian, then you are going to Heaven. Jesus said, “There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am” (John 14:2-3) Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t tell us that much about Heaven. There are some passages about it, but not a lot. For example, the apostle Paul had the unique experience of dying, going to Heaven, and having to come back to earth. Paul didn’t go into great detail about what he saw on the other side. But he said this much: “I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell” (2 Corinthians 12:4) For us to try to understand something as glorious as Heaven would be like a six-month-old baby trying to understand an explanation about the beauty of Hawaii. It’s very hard for us to wrap our minds around. No matter what happens to us on this earth, it pales in comparison to this great hope. Writing to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul said, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So, we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18) This is the hope of the Christian. There’s a better world ahead. Until that day, there is nothing that will completely satisfy our lives. There’s something greater than what we are experiencing now. Yet, not everyone has this hope. If you don’t have this hope in Christ, then you ought to be afraid right now. You ought to be afraid if you don’t know whether you will go to Heaven. The believer has great hope beyond all of this. We have the great hope that a place called Heaven is waiting for us on the other side.
In a time where clickbait titles are the norm, I had low expectations of this video, but every now and then I actually do learn something useful, and this is one of those times. I was about to say, I do sometimes get bogged down by sentences, when those sentences are like three sentences long, separated by commas, but then I realised you included on in the last example lol. It sometimes gets difficult keeping track of everything, the modifiers (especially when they come at the end), who thinks what, and so on. With the final example, I didn't even pick up on 白羽さん being the one the narrating character is looking at, and I still kinda had trouble connecting the two even after you pointed it out, because they're so far apart, and there are no brackets. But yeah, thank you for the tip!
Simply read long Japanese sentences word by word backwards (or bit by bit), and keep writing down the resulting English words bit by bit in forward order. You are in for a surprise if you try this... (Disclaimer: This advice is valid if you intend to translate the sentence. If you only intend to understand it and read on without translating it, then it is better to learn to process the Japanese text in forward order, just as Japanese people do.)
Wow, this is really helpful. I actively avoid reading Japanese despite having studied for many years simply because the sentence structure is too confusing. I feel like I have a better handle on it now thanks to this video. Thank you!
That was such a big help, especially the tidbit about て！Under the circumstances ! It really helps when the English is more flexible. Thank you so much !
Hi Bunsuke! I discovered your TH-cam from Haruka’s podcast. I have a question regarding reading books, manga in Japanese. I’m a beginner so I find there are lots of vocab I don’t understand. But I also find looking up each and everyone of them takes the enjoyment out of the reading. But if I don’t look it up I don’t understand much. What should I do to incorporate more Japanese reading into my learning but still enjoyable? Thank you!
Hi!! Thanks for commenting :) perhaps you can set a time (30 min for example) that's sustainable long term. Then decide beforehand what kind of reading day you're going to have: going slow while looking up everything you don't know, or force yourself to go faster, pushing through even when you don't understand everything while looking up only words and patterns that are repeated often in that specific text. Finally, and this is shameless self-promotion, you can hire a tutor to help you through a text and give you the tools to learn how to read more independently. I have private and group sessions starting in May in case you're interested! Cheers, b.
Really love how you're teaching Japanese in a non conventional way + getting into more niche topics. Really interested to know if you have a reading list for people at an intermediate level outside of the normal manga suggestions?
Honestly this idea is super useful in general. I feel like this also applies with listening too. I am definitely guilty of fixating on words, small details, or full sentences that I don’t understand and fail to try and grasp the big picture of what the other person is saying. Focusing on the little details can be useful for trying to learn vocab/kanji, but that needs to be let go to an extent when trying to actually understand what is overall being said. Often times, I’ve found that doing that can actually give me context clues to what I missed.
Thank you (and youtube algorithm) so much for this simple but genius advice. "How did I not think of that myself?!" Tried reading my first novel earlier today after more than 3 months of studying and it was a HARD. I wasted too much time being anxious about actually reading.
loved the video! I think intensive reading/translaton using this method is something I should do more of, because I whenever I encounter something I don't fully understand I usually focus on the main structure you talked about and not on all that unclear additional info (I'm just too lazy to check if I understand the overall meaning 😅) but I think reading something more in depth for practice will do me good at this point when the overall understanding is there 😂
If you're shifting from Genki etc to reading - I highly recommend Satori reader. It's not free, but it's so good. They have stories in Japanese, but you can tap any word for a description, plus there are very helpful grammar notes. Also, they have audio which (thankfully) is an actual Japanese person as opposed to a computer voice.
For the -て form I also like to think of the verb in the english -ing form, or in the italian gerund form (since I'm italian), I feel like it helps a lot.
I live in Japan and I struggle more communicating so I decided to stop kanji learning and focus on listening. I hope I can reach soon that point where I can understand 70% and from there continue the kanji journey. Now watching your video I wonder if I should put more effort learning verbs or is better to have a balance and go little by little. Maybe the difficult part of this language is to find what to learn and from where. Thank you for your time.
Your channel is a pearl in an ocean full of useless TH-cam videos. You deserve more views because your advices are REALLY helpful as someone who REALLY knows Japanese had to face a lot of difficulties in order to learn this language as a SVO-native learner. Many many compliments to your channel, I wish you could share more hacks like this! (sorry for my English, I'm Italian and I probably made some mistakes!)
This video blew my mind, absolutely wonderful tips and the little detour about the て form was so helpful as well!! So glad the TH-cam algorithm decided to throw this video my way, subscribed :)
This may be a tip for more advanced people, but I have found what really helped me boost my skills in reading is watching content in another language I don't understand but with subtitles in Japanese. For example, I've been watching a lot of Korean/Chinese content on Netflix in its original audio (I don't speak either language) and just turn on language reactor with Japanese subs. This of course would only work for advanced individuals who already understand Japanese at a high level (2000+ kanji, 25k+ vocab and high grammar level) as the point is not to stop the video at all (unless you really don't understand the context, but stopping should be kept to a minimum)....but I still thought I should throw it out there On a side note, if you use a VPN, you will get a lot of content not from Japan but with jsubs as well as original Japanese content that either does not exist on netflix outside Japan or has no JSubs outside Japan (I use Netflix instead of crunchyroll because it has all anime I will ever need and they all have jsubs for example)
The Believer’s Great Hope So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever. -2 Corinthians 4:18 Deep inside us, there is a sense that there’s something more in life. No matter what experiences we’ve had, no matter how wonderful they were, they were only a glimpse of what is still ahead. We are homesick for a place we’ve never been to, and that place is Heaven. The Bible says that we were wired this way, that God “has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) This simply means we have a sense there is more to life, and that keeps us moving forward. It’s like the homing instinct we see in the animal kingdom. Our homing instinct, however, is for a place we haven’t yet seen. If you are a Christian, then you are going to Heaven. Jesus said, “There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am” (John 14:2-3) Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t tell us that much about Heaven. There are some passages about it, but not a lot. For example, the apostle Paul had the unique experience of dying, going to Heaven, and having to come back to earth. Paul didn’t go into great detail about what he saw on the other side. But he said this much: “I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell” (2 Corinthians 12:4) For us to try to understand something as glorious as Heaven would be like a six-month-old baby trying to understand an explanation about the beauty of Hawaii. It’s very hard for us to wrap our minds around. No matter what happens to us on this earth, it pales in comparison to this great hope. Writing to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul said, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So, we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18) This is the hope of the Christian. There’s a better world ahead. Until that day, there is nothing that will completely satisfy our lives. There’s something greater than what we are experiencing now. Yet, not everyone has this hope. If you don’t have this hope in Christ, then you ought to be afraid right now. You ought to be afraid if you don’t know whether you will go to Heaven. The believer has great hope beyond all of this. We have the great hope that a place called Heaven is waiting for us on the other side.
They’re running on vibes and vibes alone. Jk the effort they put into everything they do is insane. Unique in an industry so massive it’s honestly amazing
But I wonder how native Japanese read the sentence, do they search for main phrase and main verb first too? Or they just read in normal sequence, and somewhat their brain will organize the meaning for them?
Great video. I also loved your collab with Fumi san. I recently read 日本人の心がわかる日本語. I took me a while and there were some sentences that I really struggled with, but in the end I got the hang of it. It really was a big step forward in my Japanese learning journey. What other books do you recommend around that level or style (glossary for each section, minimal furigana, etc.)?
Amazing! Congrats on pushing through :) i think you might enjoy 漢字が日本語になるまで that I mention in this video ;) there's a whole series with different topics so you'll be good for a while if you decide you like it :))
this is a always great advice, especially with reading. When i feel frustrated I need to remember these bits of advice. Funny enough though, I developed a tendency to essentially read sentences backwards, and I've had to really be mindful to practice comprehending a sentence in the order its written (or listened to). But as I practice that, I forget these tools to help me when reading long sentences ha ha. It is truly a journey.....
While the general idea of identifying the basic sentence structure is good, there is a rather problematic flaw in the explanation: The basic form is not AはBだ, it's AがBだ. Misunderstanding this is the biggest problem most learners have, as they completely mix up subject and topic of the sentence. Which completely throws them off when they encounter sentences in which both appear or their often invisible が is not identical with the topic. は as the basic sentence structure only works in exceptions. Meaning the ones where it's identical with the subject. There is an easy example which shows the problem of all of this: 私はうなぎだ。If you go by AはBだ as the basic structure, you would think that this sentence means "I am an Eel" Which, in the most natural use of the sentence, it does not though.
This is extremely helpful. My level is in no way close to the target group for this video and, as strange as it sounds, I don't like reading... not in my own language or in my second language of German (in spite of holding an advanced degree in philosophy). Still knowing these nuances really helps me in my listening skills and perhaps some day in my speaking skills (if I ever trust myself to speak aloud in pubic in Japanese).
Nice video, thank you. I read daily, though to be honest not for that long, just while I have coffee over 20 minutes to an hour. It's easier to understand the structure and intent of the sentence when you know all the words or at least the context is doing some heavy lifting to make guessing easy (such as when the story is very literal or based in a clear sequence of events). If it is abstract or has many unknown words, bit by bit our attention is pulled away from the meaning of the sentence and toward this individual elements. That can be very exhausting and difficult. In the beginning, because vocabulary is so small, the only way to hear and understand better is to come back to the same text each day, essentially memorizing the sentences. So ironically it can be more fun to read something that is more literary and difficult, because each sentence has more value to unpack that it makes the time spent more worthwhile. As we get past a beginner stage though, on into intermediate, we really want to find texts where there is not so much new vocabulary and we can focus more on meaning and fluency over details. It's really hard to get into a flow and intuitive understanding until you stop running into new words so often. Because we need to understand language in chunks to really get something out of it, and you can't do that if you have to keep dissecting them, regardless of word order. It's a long, slow climb.
A very helpful hack indeed. I was encouraged slightly, so I had a look at those test texts embedded in the sheet about your language classes and although the first was just about doable at a pinch, the second was a mystery. So I don't think I am good enough to do your courses! It is so dispiriting!
@@bunsuke.nihongo How do I get in touch with you? Not sure I can find an email or anything. Also, I think my level is too low for you. I don't actually know what my level is. But only that it's not great. And I am not sure whether I can really be helped somehow. However, it would be interesting to hear what you think is possible. I do tours in Japanese at Schwerin palace and the Japanese tourists seem to have no trouble understanding me (though I can never be sure, as they are not likely to say anything negative, even if they didn't understand me.)
Do I see the largest-of-all Kanji Dictionary up there on Your bookshelf? I envy You for that =) I only saw it once in 1990 but I could not afford it, so I bought a smaller (but still big) Shin-Dai-Jiten from Kodansha, which is one volume, containing 20k Kanji. When all other sources fail me, I use that one. It happens rarely but sometimes I need it. Your advice for finding the main structure of a sentence is very well explained. Another hurdle for us gaijin is the "revert grammar" like "He said that XYZ ..." is "XZY ... to itta". Once You figure that out You start to look at the sentence from the end and then backwards.
It's like a long math equation, looking at it as a whole it gets overwhelming but once you know how to divide it into smaller problems it get's a whole lot easier. Reading is probably the easiest thing about japanese, sounds disencouraging but the good thing is that you can improve in it really quickly. Will probably get fairly proficient in it after about 2k hours or so, if you put in good amount of kanji study in that time.
It's helpful, but I think I got some intuition of it already from using addons like rikaikun. It automatically selects out chunks and highlights them, so it's easier to see some of it (even when not using it). But this definitely gave new helpful perspective.
Are those special edition Brandon Sanderson books on your shelf? Thanks for the tip. A big issue for me is sentences that just end while implying the rest.
て form has always been such a headache for me to digest. Like there's no way it just means "and" because it's not always the case So thank you for the bonus tip! also will this become a bad habit where I look first the subject and look at the verb at the last just to understand a sentence as where I can just simple read through?
That was incredibly useful, thank you! As a complete beginner (N5), would you always recommend trying to identify meaning by starting at the end, or would you only consider it at the beginning for orientation? When I engage in auditory immersion, I have trouble discerning which part is related to which part of the sentence, not to mention that its going from the beginning to the end. I would guess that with a lot of immersion, things will settle in and I will rely less and less on the English mindset. PS: I'm probably mulling it over too much, and those doubts will fade with time.
Back to your video after some time. Finally I got the kanji book you recommended and it is a really good read. Digging it:) Oh and your book collection is still cool
This is definitely a big obstacle for me with sentences like the 4th example in published books and newspapers, especially with omitted subjects. If I can get this down, the next challenge will be figuring out why newspaper and website headlines are written so darn incomprehensibly.
Thanks for this. I wish i could find someone who is japanese and learn these things. Learning on your own is hard as when you google or try to query a nuanced problem, its difficult to get the specific information needed. I feel like I'd improve a lot more. My listening skills are poor. Any tips....or is practice, practice and more practice?
I think having an non-native tutor might have an advantage here as such a person understands your struggles better so if you'd like you're very welcome to join my new semester (see substack link in bio)
The Tip:
When looking at long sentence first identify whether it’s a
-AはBだ or
-AはBをする(suru is placeholder for any verb)
type of sentence
Identify A,B, (and if needed) the verb and that is your core sentence.
Then the rest of the words just add details to the core
I started this video thinking "this is clickbait, I've seen thousands of those videos, he will say something like "Remember all 2000 kanjis!"", but no. Man, this is incredible advice, and I will definitely implement that starting today. It's a really good timing because I just recently got into reading books in Japanese, so I guess I'll do it right from the "almost" beginning. Thank you!
How’s your progress been in the last 5 months? Anything you learned that you’d do differently or recommend to others since then?
7:41 this is paramount to learning the differences in how Japanese is communicated and has always been a huge challenge for me. It comes back to that common feeling of "I know these words, I can read the kanji, I hear the pronunciation, why can't I understand this?!" Thank you for this video.
The Believer’s Great Hope
So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.
-2 Corinthians 4:18
Deep inside us, there is a sense that there’s something more in life. No matter what experiences we’ve had, no matter how wonderful they were, they were only a glimpse of what is still ahead. We are homesick for a place we’ve never been to, and that place is Heaven.
The Bible says that we were wired this way, that God “has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
This simply means we have a sense there is more to life, and that keeps us moving forward.
It’s like the homing instinct we see in the animal kingdom. Our homing instinct, however, is for a place we haven’t yet seen.
If you are a Christian, then you are going to Heaven. Jesus said, “There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am”
(John 14:2-3)
Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t tell us that much about Heaven. There are some passages about it, but not a lot.
For example, the apostle Paul had the unique experience of dying, going to Heaven, and having to come back to earth. Paul didn’t go into great detail about what he saw on the other side. But he said this much: “I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell”
(2 Corinthians 12:4)
For us to try to understand something as glorious as Heaven would be like a six-month-old baby trying to understand an explanation about the beauty of Hawaii. It’s very hard for us to wrap our minds around.
No matter what happens to us on this earth, it pales in comparison to this great hope.
Writing to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul said, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So, we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever”
(2 Corinthians 4:17-18)
This is the hope of the Christian. There’s a better world ahead. Until that day, there is nothing that will completely satisfy our lives. There’s something greater than what we are experiencing now.
Yet, not everyone has this hope. If you don’t have this hope in Christ, then you ought to be afraid right now. You ought to be afraid if you don’t know whether you will go to Heaven.
The believer has great hope beyond all of this. We have the great hope that a place called Heaven is waiting for us on the other side.
Thanks. I feel very 日本語上手 now.
I procrastinate a lot when it comes to reading japanese because my brain tells me it's gonna be sooo hard. This video has given me motivation to try again, thank you!
It's easy to do with with lots of things. Exercise. Working on a side project. Just have to hop in and tell yourself you'll do it for 10 minutes. After that you can take a break if you're really struggling or it might not be that bad and you can keep going!
"Under the circumstances that" is a brilliant way to translate て before you understand the the context. Really enjoyed this!
Thank you. As someone who has been struggling with Japanese for ten years and wrestling with novels for most of that time, this was a great opportunity to take a step back and reflect on the “big picture” and look at the forest rather than the trees. I’ve been following your sub stack and you tube videos for several years, and really appreciate your advice for learners. It’s great to see that even someone who has achieved a high level in Japanese struggled with many of the same issues in the learning process!
Thank you for the kind words!! And yes, struggle I did! But can also say it's been 100% worth the long journey, so don't give up! Happy to help where I can :))
The Believer’s Great Hope
So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.
-2 Corinthians 4:18
Deep inside us, there is a sense that there’s something more in life. No matter what experiences we’ve had, no matter how wonderful they were, they were only a glimpse of what is still ahead. We are homesick for a place we’ve never been to, and that place is Heaven.
The Bible says that we were wired this way, that God “has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
This simply means we have a sense there is more to life, and that keeps us moving forward.
It’s like the homing instinct we see in the animal kingdom. Our homing instinct, however, is for a place we haven’t yet seen.
If you are a Christian, then you are going to Heaven. Jesus said, “There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am”
(John 14:2-3)
Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t tell us that much about Heaven. There are some passages about it, but not a lot.
For example, the apostle Paul had the unique experience of dying, going to Heaven, and having to come back to earth. Paul didn’t go into great detail about what he saw on the other side. But he said this much: “I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell”
(2 Corinthians 12:4)
For us to try to understand something as glorious as Heaven would be like a six-month-old baby trying to understand an explanation about the beauty of Hawaii. It’s very hard for us to wrap our minds around.
No matter what happens to us on this earth, it pales in comparison to this great hope.
Writing to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul said, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So, we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever”
(2 Corinthians 4:17-18)
This is the hope of the Christian. There’s a better world ahead. Until that day, there is nothing that will completely satisfy our lives. There’s something greater than what we are experiencing now.
Yet, not everyone has this hope. If you don’t have this hope in Christ, then you ought to be afraid right now. You ought to be afraid if you don’t know whether you will go to Heaven.
The believer has great hope beyond all of this. We have the great hope that a place called Heaven is waiting for us on the other side.
I'm really interested to know after 10 years of reading novels how you feel about your level and things you think might have been missing from your strategy if it doesn't feel satisfactory. I've sort of been going forward with reading lots of short stories the past year with a kind of assumption my level will gradually rise as I get used to things. Do you think I'm likely to be disappointed? Everybody applies this strategy in a bit of a different way, so I'm curious if it may be an indefinite struggle for me and my way.
What are your struggles you’ve had over your ten year journey? I just started 2 weeks ago and I have a good plan but I def need as much advice as possible to achieve decent fluency in 2 years instead of 10 😅
@@CaptainWumbo I’ve passed JLPT N2, but not quite N1 yet. This is just a hobby, I have a full time job and kids, so I study a few hours a week. All the time I steadily feel like I understand a little more than before. I started with graded readers and then moved on to novels from accessible authors like 西村京太郎 or 東野圭吾。I don’t have any great advice other than try and dive into native Japanese materials that you would enjoy even if it was in your own language whether it’s manga or anime or detective novels or serious literature or whatever. Good luck!
When I read in Japanese I don't really translate into English. As when I read my mind turns words into movie like images and sounds.
Also when I have any areas that I don't understand I find that if I keep going I tend to understand it later subconsciously.
Though it is only my 2nd year of reading and I am already seeing vast amounts of improvements.
I am excited for what my 3rd and 4th years reading can do for my Japanese skills.
Very helpful tips, advice on reading Japanese is somewhat rare to find, especially on TH-cam. Initially, I used to stumble a lot when encountering long sentences, but after reading extensively, I gradually got used to the flow of Japanese writing "for the most part." One tip I learned from Luke Ranieri is to read while listening to audio books. They have noticeably helped me increase my reading speed because the narrator adds emotion to the sentences, making them easier to understand and parse.
Excellent tip, thank you!
I've been learning japanese for 3 years and I still struggle with long sentences.Thank you so much! This gives me a totallly new perspective about japanese grammar.
A highly important thing to be doing is reading native narrative sentences rather than just reading people talking to each other. A month or two of reading a LOT of narrative work enhanced my japanese more than anything else ever did. It is incredibly easy to "get lost" in narratives because everything is so based on context. Reading slower also makes it harder to keep track of the narrative. What's the solution? Just read more and more narratives. It's really the only way to do it (and studying grammar points as they pop up). Just use a pop-up dictionary like Yomitan and your own brain to find grammatical structures that look unfamiliar.
This is premium content. ほんとにありがとうございます,ブンスケさん
I have been reading a lot of Visual Novels in Japanese recently and this really helped me a lot. Literally gave me a eureka moment. Thank you Bunsuke-sensei.
The Believer’s Great Hope
So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.
-2 Corinthians 4:18
Deep inside us, there is a sense that there’s something more in life. No matter what experiences we’ve had, no matter how wonderful they were, they were only a glimpse of what is still ahead. We are homesick for a place we’ve never been to, and that place is Heaven.
The Bible says that we were wired this way, that God “has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
This simply means we have a sense there is more to life, and that keeps us moving forward.
It’s like the homing instinct we see in the animal kingdom. Our homing instinct, however, is for a place we haven’t yet seen.
If you are a Christian, then you are going to Heaven. Jesus said, “There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am”
(John 14:2-3)
Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t tell us that much about Heaven. There are some passages about it, but not a lot.
For example, the apostle Paul had the unique experience of dying, going to Heaven, and having to come back to earth. Paul didn’t go into great detail about what he saw on the other side. But he said this much: “I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell”
(2 Corinthians 12:4)
For us to try to understand something as glorious as Heaven would be like a six-month-old baby trying to understand an explanation about the beauty of Hawaii. It’s very hard for us to wrap our minds around.
No matter what happens to us on this earth, it pales in comparison to this great hope.
Writing to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul said, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So, we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever”
(2 Corinthians 4:17-18)
This is the hope of the Christian. There’s a better world ahead. Until that day, there is nothing that will completely satisfy our lives. There’s something greater than what we are experiencing now.
Yet, not everyone has this hope. If you don’t have this hope in Christ, then you ought to be afraid right now. You ought to be afraid if you don’t know whether you will go to Heaven.
The believer has great hope beyond all of this. We have the great hope that a place called Heaven is waiting for us on the other side.
This is a crazy hidden gem- you’re an excellent teacher
This is so funny because I've been discouraged from reading recently, struggling on a very long sentence that was breaking my ability to parse any meaning, and it's LITERALLY THE SENTENCE YOU CHOSE from konbini ningen. Thank you for the tips, you've helped me push through that discomfort.
非ネイティブにも関わらず、日本人よりも難しい本を読んでますね（笑）非常に関心しました！！私は逆に英語を勉強してますので、このチャンネルが英語の勉強となっています。応援してます！
Thanks
My struggle right now is finding material that is interesting but also my level.
What is your level? Maybe I, or other people in the comment section, can help out and make suggestions :)))
@@bunsuke.nihongo recently passed n5 exam and currently studying in n4 classes. But more of my learning comes from watching a ton of youtube videos such as podcasts and other immersion videos as well as a ton of anime without subtitles.
Listening comprehension has become a strong skill of mine but I struggle with reading since I don't read nearly as much other than textbooks
Just jump straight into the hard stuff. It's a grind at first but it worked out for me!
@@Joshuwa8 oh cool, we're at similar levels
I've only just started to take immersion seriously and I'm starting to learn all the kanji I was avoiding
i highly suggest the site natively, they rank japanese books, novels, manga, and shows by difficulty and has been a fantastic resource for me
Great video - For me, as someone who is starting to get into much longer Japanese reading, some tips -
1) Contrary to what I've been told in the past, I think studying Japanese names and their readings is really important for fast reading - not really to know the true reading, but because many of the readings to the untrained reader appear like ordinary words, and it helps to know what is not a word - this reduces the amount of context to interpret in the sentence, and you can replace that part of the sentence with a black box. It also helps you identify place names, people, cities, and locations, which is not necessarily important for the meaning of the sentence. I use Japanese name anki decks for this.
2) If you don't understand at least 70% of the words you're reading (7 out of 10 words), the work may be too difficult and you should probably stop to learn the vocabulary first -
This is very helpful! Actually, this is also how I practiced my English reading skills. But what I often struggle with is that Japanese sentences don't usually have a clear subject, which really gives me a hard time trying to identify who does the action. Also, the most confusing pair of particles of は and が makes it even harder for me to read Japanese
Because in a way Japanese sentences do not have subject, only doer of the action. The so-called subject in Japanese is not that important, and it can be omitted.
は just like も do not indicate the subject. Only "が" does. For details read my long comment I posted ten minutes ago.
The Believer’s Great Hope
So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.
-2 Corinthians 4:18
Deep inside us, there is a sense that there’s something more in life. No matter what experiences we’ve had, no matter how wonderful they were, they were only a glimpse of what is still ahead. We are homesick for a place we’ve never been to, and that place is Heaven.
The Bible says that we were wired this way, that God “has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
This simply means we have a sense there is more to life, and that keeps us moving forward.
It’s like the homing instinct we see in the animal kingdom. Our homing instinct, however, is for a place we haven’t yet seen.
If you are a Christian, then you are going to Heaven. Jesus said, “There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am”
(John 14:2-3)
Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t tell us that much about Heaven. There are some passages about it, but not a lot.
For example, the apostle Paul had the unique experience of dying, going to Heaven, and having to come back to earth. Paul didn’t go into great detail about what he saw on the other side. But he said this much: “I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell”
(2 Corinthians 12:4)
For us to try to understand something as glorious as Heaven would be like a six-month-old baby trying to understand an explanation about the beauty of Hawaii. It’s very hard for us to wrap our minds around.
No matter what happens to us on this earth, it pales in comparison to this great hope.
Writing to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul said, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So, we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever”
(2 Corinthians 4:17-18)
This is the hope of the Christian. There’s a better world ahead. Until that day, there is nothing that will completely satisfy our lives. There’s something greater than what we are experiencing now.
Yet, not everyone has this hope. If you don’t have this hope in Christ, then you ought to be afraid right now. You ought to be afraid if you don’t know whether you will go to Heaven.
The believer has great hope beyond all of this. We have the great hope that a place called Heaven is waiting for us on the other side.
「スケルトン・センテンス」
目から鱗。英語でどう言えば良いのか、ずーっと考えてました。
「骨子文。」「骨子だけの文にする（装飾を剥ぎ取る）。」これを英語で言えませんでした。肉を剥ぎ取れば骸骨が残る。腑に落ちました。
Hello Bunsuke-sensei,
I'm one of your YT and Instagram followers, from Italy.
I rarely comment on TH-cam but I wanted to make an exception today because I would like to thank you for this video: it's filled to the brim with very valuable advice.
I've been studying Japanese for a long time. I spent a few years in Japan, studied Japanese at university, completed a degree in Japanese literature (my dissertation was on Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's 陰影礼賛) and then continued my learning journey pretty much solo because I still have a long, long way to go. As if I've barely scratched the surface.
It's been a rough and lonely journey. Lots of struggling, tears and discouragement. However, there's an underpinning drive to conquer this mountain and this is why, somehow, I can't give up. The sense of wonder and enrichment I get along the way is something that never ceases to amaze me.
One thing that has always been a part of my studies are books and the incessant love for reading (and writing!). So, despite what many may say or recommend, I find that reading a lot is most beneficial (paper books). I tackle books without fear, no matter how difficult they may appear to be (and often are).
I've tried the Anki route but there's just something about absorbing vocabulary or kanji disconnected from their contexts that makes learning impersonal and, in the end, fruitless. And not learning from real paper books is another obstacle for me.
So why am I writing all of this? Because I truly appreciated the tips and tricks you've shared in this video: they're smart hacks that can make my journey a bit easier. I read all kinds of things, from food essays to contemporary literature (I really enjoy Hiromi Kawakami's stories) but still I keep hitting walls with convoluted sentences that sometimes just make me question why I am even bothering with all of this.
I guess I'm really in need of some encouragement to keep going.
Sometimes the reading is a smooth sail while others it's like hiking in nettle-infested woods. It sometimes feels like I'll never ever make it.
Oh and by the way, I am also one of your subscribers to your excellent newsletter which I learn a lot from.
Please keep it up and thank you SO much for reading my comment.
Thank you for your thoughtful and kind comment!!! I'm glad this content is helping you out. Language learning always has more downs than ups but the small wins usually make it worth the pain and effort. Btw I have some wonderful people in my group lessons. If you'd like to have a less lonely reading experience perhaps you could consider joining the cohort from the May semester. Just throwing it out there are an option :) good luck, and let me know if there's anything I can do to help!
I believe your channel is the most useful resource for the people who are going from beginner to intermediate Japanese or even advanced Japanese. No other channel really covers so well the topics that you've been talking about. I would highly recommend your channel to all of my friends who are studying Japanese
Thanks so much!! Please do spread the word, i'd love it if my platfprm reached more people in the awkward beginner-to-intermediate and beyond phase of their Japanese language learning journey :))
The Believer’s Great Hope
So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.
-2 Corinthians 4:18
Deep inside us, there is a sense that there’s something more in life. No matter what experiences we’ve had, no matter how wonderful they were, they were only a glimpse of what is still ahead. We are homesick for a place we’ve never been to, and that place is Heaven.
The Bible says that we were wired this way, that God “has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
This simply means we have a sense there is more to life, and that keeps us moving forward.
It’s like the homing instinct we see in the animal kingdom. Our homing instinct, however, is for a place we haven’t yet seen.
If you are a Christian, then you are going to Heaven. Jesus said, “There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am”
(John 14:2-3)
Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t tell us that much about Heaven. There are some passages about it, but not a lot.
For example, the apostle Paul had the unique experience of dying, going to Heaven, and having to come back to earth. Paul didn’t go into great detail about what he saw on the other side. But he said this much: “I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell”
(2 Corinthians 12:4)
For us to try to understand something as glorious as Heaven would be like a six-month-old baby trying to understand an explanation about the beauty of Hawaii. It’s very hard for us to wrap our minds around.
No matter what happens to us on this earth, it pales in comparison to this great hope.
Writing to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul said, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So, we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever”
(2 Corinthians 4:17-18)
This is the hope of the Christian. There’s a better world ahead. Until that day, there is nothing that will completely satisfy our lives. There’s something greater than what we are experiencing now.
Yet, not everyone has this hope. If you don’t have this hope in Christ, then you ought to be afraid right now. You ought to be afraid if you don’t know whether you will go to Heaven.
The believer has great hope beyond all of this. We have the great hope that a place called Heaven is waiting for us on the other side.
this will be a HUGE help for me! i’ve been reading a lot of japanese short stories and reading visual novels and often tend to be lost in the smaller details and i end up getting frustrated when seeing bigger blocks of sentences like you pointed out in the コンビニ人間 segment. this video felt like a lightbulb turning on in my head. much thanks Bunsuke-sensei!!
Thank so much I'm glad this helped😊
What a great video. I started learning Japanese by learning the 2100 Kanji first, a ton of vocab, did N5 and N4 grammar and thought I was ready to start reading something more complicated than children books. It was quite demotivating to see that I knew almost all of the Kanji and vocab in a sentence but still struggled to figure out the complete meaning. I think this video opened up my eyes, at least a great motivation to approach it differently than I did.
Excellent video. Example 5 seems unwieldy until we break it down. Very helpful.
just discovered this channel WOW massively impressed. Next level insights
7:00
I'm so happy I got close to that, I translated it in my head as
"Japanese people act with the feelings of others in mind"
I guess that entire sentence can just be called 建前、(Tatemae)
Which is the 'mindset' of which an overwhelming majority of Japanese people abide by.
The meaning as i understand it is as follows.
- Don't cause inconvenience to those around you,
Don't engage in behaviours that bother those around you or negatively impact society or the image of Japan, or your family.
The positive points of this has made Japan a very safe and clean country.
While the negative parts further push down the real self more than other societies.
Hence the type of social problems that we see in Japan being a lot more frequent in Japan per capita than most other countries.
And the culture sometimes seeming very strange, due to gameshows, interview techniques, adds, (Cultured content)
I realized I spent too much time on this comment and gave up, it's not great but it's good enough. Thanks.
To me the moment of revelation about て was accepting that it can mean quite different things, in different usages, probably because different 助詞 and 助動詞 eventually merged into the same sound て over hundreds of years (don't quote me on that)
The "under the circumstance of" method sounds great! Gotta try it too
The Believer’s Great Hope
So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.
-2 Corinthians 4:18
Deep inside us, there is a sense that there’s something more in life. No matter what experiences we’ve had, no matter how wonderful they were, they were only a glimpse of what is still ahead. We are homesick for a place we’ve never been to, and that place is Heaven.
The Bible says that we were wired this way, that God “has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
This simply means we have a sense there is more to life, and that keeps us moving forward.
It’s like the homing instinct we see in the animal kingdom. Our homing instinct, however, is for a place we haven’t yet seen.
If you are a Christian, then you are going to Heaven. Jesus said, “There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am”
(John 14:2-3)
Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t tell us that much about Heaven. There are some passages about it, but not a lot.
For example, the apostle Paul had the unique experience of dying, going to Heaven, and having to come back to earth. Paul didn’t go into great detail about what he saw on the other side. But he said this much: “I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell”
(2 Corinthians 12:4)
For us to try to understand something as glorious as Heaven would be like a six-month-old baby trying to understand an explanation about the beauty of Hawaii. It’s very hard for us to wrap our minds around.
No matter what happens to us on this earth, it pales in comparison to this great hope.
Writing to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul said, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So, we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever”
(2 Corinthians 4:17-18)
This is the hope of the Christian. There’s a better world ahead. Until that day, there is nothing that will completely satisfy our lives. There’s something greater than what we are experiencing now.
Yet, not everyone has this hope. If you don’t have this hope in Christ, then you ought to be afraid right now. You ought to be afraid if you don’t know whether you will go to Heaven.
The believer has great hope beyond all of this. We have the great hope that a place called Heaven is waiting for us on the other side.
I've been using light novels to practice jp, this video is very useful and has taught me a lot. I aspire to read just as many books as you
In a time where clickbait titles are the norm, I had low expectations of this video, but every now and then I actually do learn something useful, and this is one of those times. I was about to say, I do sometimes get bogged down by sentences, when those sentences are like three sentences long, separated by commas, but then I realised you included on in the last example lol. It sometimes gets difficult keeping track of everything, the modifiers (especially when they come at the end), who thinks what, and so on. With the final example, I didn't even pick up on 白羽さん being the one the narrating character is looking at, and I still kinda had trouble connecting the two even after you pointed it out, because they're so far apart, and there are no brackets.
But yeah, thank you for the tip!
Simply read long Japanese sentences word by word backwards (or bit by bit), and keep writing down the resulting English words bit by bit in forward order. You are in for a surprise if you try this...
(Disclaimer: This advice is valid if you intend to translate the sentence. If you only intend to understand it and read on without translating it, then it is better to learn to process the Japanese text in forward order, just as Japanese people do.)
Thank you!
Actually great advice. I've been learning for 10 years and just realized I've been doing this subconsciously. 読書のおすすめありがとうございます!知らずに従った😂
小学生の頃、主語述語目的語にそれぞれ線を引いたり、文を組み替えたりする問題を塾で沢山解かされたのを思い出しました
正直面倒くさくて当時は嫌いな問題でしたが、今思うと自分の日本語を改善するのに大きな役割を果たしていたのかなと思います
Wow, this is really helpful. I actively avoid reading Japanese despite having studied for many years simply because the sentence structure is too confusing. I feel like I have a better handle on it now thanks to this video. Thank you!
とても興味深く拝見しました。英語を読むとき、私はしょっちゅう迷子になりますが、海外の日本語学習者も同じだったんですね。
ぶんすけ先生が子供達の国語の先生だったら楽しいだろうなぁ😊
こんな顔の国語の先生が現れたら相当びっくりするんだろうな😂コメントありがとうございます！
I love コンビニ人間、 this is a great video
That was such a big help, especially the tidbit about て！Under the circumstances ! It really helps when the English is more flexible. Thank you so much !
You're very very welcome :)))
Hi Bunsuke! I discovered your TH-cam from Haruka’s podcast. I have a question regarding reading books, manga in Japanese. I’m a beginner so I find there are lots of vocab I don’t understand. But I also find looking up each and everyone of them takes the enjoyment out of the reading. But if I don’t look it up I don’t understand much. What should I do to incorporate more Japanese reading into my learning but still enjoyable? Thank you!
Hi!! Thanks for commenting :) perhaps you can set a time (30 min for example) that's sustainable long term. Then decide beforehand what kind of reading day you're going to have: going slow while looking up everything you don't know, or force yourself to go faster, pushing through even when you don't understand everything while looking up only words and patterns that are repeated often in that specific text. Finally, and this is shameless self-promotion, you can hire a tutor to help you through a text and give you the tools to learn how to read more independently. I have private and group sessions starting in May in case you're interested! Cheers, b.
awesome advice. thank you
You are such a good teacher! Thank you! Subscribed to your channel and mailing list🐧
Finally a video on Japanese learning with useful information. The number of videos giving a broad outline with no useful specifics is too damn high.
わたしは暦60年の日本語ネイティブですが、とても助かる情報でした
日本語の複雑さをどうやって単純化するか？に苦労しているからです
…I thought my japanese sentence written above is not good😅
Filled to the brim with excellent advice and information. Thank you, my friend. 🙏🏼
Really love how you're teaching Japanese in a non conventional way + getting into more niche topics. Really interested to know if you have a reading list for people at an intermediate level outside of the normal manga suggestions?
This is good advice.
Thank you for this. I needed it.
Honestly this idea is super useful in general. I feel like this also applies with listening too. I am definitely guilty of fixating on words, small details, or full sentences that I don’t understand and fail to try and grasp the big picture of what the other person is saying. Focusing on the little details can be useful for trying to learn vocab/kanji, but that needs to be let go to an extent when trying to actually understand what is overall being said. Often times, I’ve found that doing that can actually give me context clues to what I missed.
Excellent info. Thanks
Thank you (and youtube algorithm) so much for this simple but genius advice. "How did I not think of that myself?!"
Tried reading my first novel earlier today after more than 3 months of studying and it was a HARD. I wasted too much time being anxious about actually reading.
小説を読める外国人を見たのは初めてで驚きました。日本人でも難しい本を読みますね～。本当すごい。
日本人だけど、私の国語の先生になってほしいな笑
あとものすごくイケメンですね。
このめちゃ役に立つの動画を作ってくれてありがとうございました😊。
loved the video! I think intensive reading/translaton using this method is something I should do more of, because I whenever I encounter something I don't fully understand I usually focus on the main structure you talked about and not on all that unclear additional info (I'm just too lazy to check if I understand the overall meaning 😅) but I think reading something more in depth for practice will do me good at this point when the overall understanding is there 😂
Happy to hear you liked it!! Maybe joining the May cohort i mention at the end could help with the details :)) let me know if i can help in any way!
This is true. It works with Chinese as well.
If you're shifting from Genki etc to reading - I highly recommend Satori reader. It's not free, but it's so good. They have stories in Japanese, but you can tap any word for a description, plus there are very helpful grammar notes. Also, they have audio which (thankfully) is an actual Japanese person as opposed to a computer voice.
For the -て form I also like to think of the verb in the english -ing form, or in the italian gerund form (since I'm italian), I feel like it helps a lot.
I live in Japan and I struggle more communicating so I decided to stop kanji learning and focus on listening.
I hope I can reach soon that point where I can understand 70% and from there continue the kanji journey.
Now watching your video I wonder if I should put more effort learning verbs or is better to have a balance and go little by little.
Maybe the difficult part of this language is to find what to learn and from where.
Thank you for your time.
Thanks for such a helpful video. You are a rare japanese teacher who brings the forest into focus around the trees😊
My native is Turkish so Japanese came real easy to me. How they structure their sentences is so interesting =)
Your channel is a pearl in an ocean full of useless TH-cam videos. You deserve more views because your advices are REALLY helpful as someone who REALLY knows Japanese had to face a lot of difficulties in order to learn this language as a SVO-native learner.
Many many compliments to your channel, I wish you could share more hacks like this! (sorry for my English, I'm Italian and I probably made some mistakes!)
Awwww what a comment!!! This made my day, thanks so much❤️
This was so helpful. Thank you!
自分もコンビニ人間を読みました！学校の図書館で借りたなあ.....
私は第二外国語として英語を勉強中です!
Mano faz tempo que estava procurando um vídeo Sobre Esse assunto Finalmente apareceu Muito grato Arigatou
This was such a useful tip, thank you so much!
Super helpful immediately subscribed
Thank you, those were actually great tips!
This video blew my mind, absolutely wonderful tips and the little detour about the て form was so helpful as well!! So glad the TH-cam algorithm decided to throw this video my way, subscribed :)
This may be a tip for more advanced people, but I have found what really helped me boost my skills in reading is watching content in another language I don't understand but with subtitles in Japanese. For example, I've been watching a lot of Korean/Chinese content on Netflix in its original audio (I don't speak either language) and just turn on language reactor with Japanese subs.
This of course would only work for advanced individuals who already understand Japanese at a high level (2000+ kanji, 25k+ vocab and high grammar level) as the point is not to stop the video at all (unless you really don't understand the context, but stopping should be kept to a minimum)....but I still thought I should throw it out there
On a side note, if you use a VPN, you will get a lot of content not from Japan but with jsubs as well as original Japanese content that either does not exist on netflix outside Japan or has no JSubs outside Japan (I use Netflix instead of crunchyroll because it has all anime I will ever need and they all have jsubs for example)
The Believer’s Great Hope
So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.
-2 Corinthians 4:18
Deep inside us, there is a sense that there’s something more in life. No matter what experiences we’ve had, no matter how wonderful they were, they were only a glimpse of what is still ahead. We are homesick for a place we’ve never been to, and that place is Heaven.
The Bible says that we were wired this way, that God “has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
This simply means we have a sense there is more to life, and that keeps us moving forward.
It’s like the homing instinct we see in the animal kingdom. Our homing instinct, however, is for a place we haven’t yet seen.
If you are a Christian, then you are going to Heaven. Jesus said, “There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am”
(John 14:2-3)
Interestingly, the Bible doesn’t tell us that much about Heaven. There are some passages about it, but not a lot.
For example, the apostle Paul had the unique experience of dying, going to Heaven, and having to come back to earth. Paul didn’t go into great detail about what he saw on the other side. But he said this much: “I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell”
(2 Corinthians 12:4)
For us to try to understand something as glorious as Heaven would be like a six-month-old baby trying to understand an explanation about the beauty of Hawaii. It’s very hard for us to wrap our minds around.
No matter what happens to us on this earth, it pales in comparison to this great hope.
Writing to the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul said, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So, we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever”
(2 Corinthians 4:17-18)
This is the hope of the Christian. There’s a better world ahead. Until that day, there is nothing that will completely satisfy our lives. There’s something greater than what we are experiencing now.
Yet, not everyone has this hope. If you don’t have this hope in Christ, then you ought to be afraid right now. You ought to be afraid if you don’t know whether you will go to Heaven.
The believer has great hope beyond all of this. We have the great hope that a place called Heaven is waiting for us on the other side.
thank you for posting this exercise
They’re running on vibes and vibes alone. Jk the effort they put into everything they do is insane. Unique in an industry so massive it’s honestly amazing
But I wonder how native Japanese read the sentence, do they search for main phrase and main verb first too? Or they just read in normal sequence, and somewhat their brain will organize the meaning for them?
Great video. I also loved your collab with Fumi san. I recently read 日本人の心がわかる日本語. I took me a while and there were some sentences that I really struggled with, but in the end I got the hang of it. It really was a big step forward in my Japanese learning journey. What other books do you recommend around that level or style (glossary for each section, minimal furigana, etc.)?
Amazing! Congrats on pushing through :) i think you might enjoy 漢字が日本語になるまで that I mention in this video ;) there's a whole series with different topics so you'll be good for a while if you decide you like it :))
@@bunsuke.nihongo I will definitely check it out! I hope someday I can have a bookshelf as full as yours xP
I haven't learn that much to be able to read kanji, but it's such an inspiration
this is a always great advice, especially with reading. When i feel frustrated I need to remember these bits of advice. Funny enough though, I developed a tendency to essentially read sentences backwards, and I've had to really be mindful to practice comprehending a sentence in the order its written (or listened to). But as I practice that, I forget these tools to help me when reading long sentences ha ha. It is truly a journey.....
While the general idea of identifying the basic sentence structure is good, there is a rather problematic flaw in the explanation: The basic form is not AはBだ, it's AがBだ. Misunderstanding this is the biggest problem most learners have, as they completely mix up subject and topic of the sentence. Which completely throws them off when they encounter sentences in which both appear or their often invisible が is not identical with the topic. は as the basic sentence structure only works in exceptions. Meaning the ones where it's identical with the subject.
There is an easy example which shows the problem of all of this: 私はうなぎだ。If you go by AはBだ as the basic structure, you would think that this sentence means "I am an Eel" Which, in the most natural use of the sentence, it does not though.
True (if basic structure means subject IS predicate. I skipped large chunks of the video as it was too convoluted so might have missed it).
This is extremely helpful. My level is in no way close to the target group for this video and, as strange as it sounds, I don't like reading... not in my own language or in my second language of German (in spite of holding an advanced degree in philosophy). Still knowing these nuances really helps me in my listening skills and perhaps some day in my speaking skills (if I ever trust myself to speak aloud in pubic in Japanese).
Nice video, thank you.
I read daily, though to be honest not for that long, just while I have coffee over 20 minutes to an hour. It's easier to understand the structure and intent of the sentence when you know all the words or at least the context is doing some heavy lifting to make guessing easy (such as when the story is very literal or based in a clear sequence of events). If it is abstract or has many unknown words, bit by bit our attention is pulled away from the meaning of the sentence and toward this individual elements. That can be very exhausting and difficult. In the beginning, because vocabulary is so small, the only way to hear and understand better is to come back to the same text each day, essentially memorizing the sentences. So ironically it can be more fun to read something that is more literary and difficult, because each sentence has more value to unpack that it makes the time spent more worthwhile. As we get past a beginner stage though, on into intermediate, we really want to find texts where there is not so much new vocabulary and we can focus more on meaning and fluency over details. It's really hard to get into a flow and intuitive understanding until you stop running into new words so often. Because we need to understand language in chunks to really get something out of it, and you can't do that if you have to keep dissecting them, regardless of word order.
It's a long, slow climb.
A very helpful hack indeed. I was encouraged slightly, so I had a look at those test texts embedded in the sheet about your language classes and although the first was just about doable at a pinch, the second was a mystery. So I don't think I am good enough to do your courses! It is so dispiriting!
The private sessions are flexible so you're welcome to join if you want, although the schedule is pretty full! Feel free to get in touch :)
@@bunsuke.nihongo How do I get in touch with you? Not sure I can find an email or anything.
Also, I think my level is too low for you. I don't actually know what my level is. But only that it's not great. And I am not sure whether I can really be helped somehow.
However, it would be interesting to hear what you think is possible. I do tours in Japanese at Schwerin palace and the Japanese tourists seem to have no trouble understanding me (though I can never be sure, as they are not likely to say anything negative, even if they didn't understand me.)
Thats really motivator! Thank you so much 🎉😊
Do I see the largest-of-all Kanji Dictionary up there on Your bookshelf? I envy You for that =) I only saw it once in 1990 but I could not afford it, so I bought a smaller (but still big) Shin-Dai-Jiten from Kodansha, which is one volume, containing 20k Kanji. When all other sources fail me, I use that one. It happens rarely but sometimes I need it.
Your advice for finding the main structure of a sentence is very well explained. Another hurdle for us gaijin is the "revert grammar" like "He said that XYZ ..." is "XZY ... to itta". Once You figure that out You start to look at the sentence from the end and then backwards.
It's like a long math equation, looking at it as a whole it gets overwhelming but once you know how to divide it into smaller problems it get's a whole lot easier. Reading is probably the easiest thing about japanese, sounds disencouraging but the good thing is that you can improve in it really quickly. Will probably get fairly proficient in it after about 2k hours or so, if you put in good amount of kanji study in that time.
ありがとうございますブンスケ先生!
とんでもない！何かあったらいつでも連絡ちょうだいや！
It's helpful, but I think I got some intuition of it already from using addons like rikaikun. It automatically selects out chunks and highlights them, so it's easier to see some of it (even when not using it). But this definitely gave new helpful perspective.
You’re an inspiration.
i barely deal with short sentences but i'm definerly adding this video to my learning playlist to come back to later >:D
It's an amazingly helpful video! Thank you so much!
You're very welcome!!! Glad it helps :))))
This video is so useful! I’m saving it!
Thanks so much🥳
Are those special edition Brandon Sanderson books on your shelf?
Thanks for the tip. A big issue for me is sentences that just end while implying the rest.
Glad this was helpful!
Hahah that's my 諸橋大漢和辞典!
純オランダ人かな
信じられないくらい日本語上手なんですけど😊
great video! also holy moly that is a LONG sentence at 8:29
Thanks, glad this was useful!
Haha it wasn't just clickbait ;)
7:15 You know what.. I will😊
This is how I learned advanced Japanese reading in university. Really good video!!
て form has always been such a headache for me to digest. Like there's no way it just means "and" because it's not always the case So thank you for the bonus tip!
also will this become a bad habit where I look first the subject and look at the verb at the last just to understand a sentence as where I can just simple read through?
You are not alone!! Glad this was helpful🤩
I normally just accept it for what it is. While I DO search up kanji. I personally deep dive into the grammar and move on after im done
Fair enough☺️
That was incredibly useful, thank you!
As a complete beginner (N5), would you always recommend trying to identify meaning by starting at the end, or would you only consider it at the beginning for orientation? When I engage in auditory immersion, I have trouble discerning which part is related to which part of the sentence, not to mention that its going from the beginning to the end.
I would guess that with a lot of immersion, things will settle in and I will rely less and less on the English mindset.
PS: I'm probably mulling it over too much, and those doubts will fade with time.
Finally a youtuber who reads japanese literature AND doesn't sound like he just got off the boat
I only read when videos have subtitles and comments or subtitles in jp only games.
Back to your video after some time. Finally I got the kanji book you recommended and it is a really good read. Digging it:) Oh and your book collection is still cool
Oh you got it!!? Feel like a real influencer now😂 Happy to see you're enjoying it :))
This is definitely a big obstacle for me with sentences like the 4th example in published books and newspapers, especially with omitted subjects. If I can get this down, the next challenge will be figuring out why newspaper and website headlines are written so darn incomprehensibly.
Thanks for this. I wish i could find someone who is japanese and learn these things. Learning on your own is hard as when you google or try to query a nuanced problem, its difficult to get the specific information needed. I feel like I'd improve a lot more. My listening skills are poor. Any tips....or is practice, practice and more practice?
I think having an non-native tutor might have an advantage here as such a person understands your struggles better so if you'd like you're very welcome to join my new semester (see substack link in bio)